to introduce
perspective and naturalism into religious painting, so it resisted the concurrent Western tendency to use bells to provide orderly musical intervals or to accompany (with fixed tonal values and often in conjunction with an organ) the singing of sacred offices.89
The bell played an important part in material as well as spiritual culture through its technological tie-in with the manufacture of cannon. Already by the late fourteenth century-only a few years after the first appearance of cannon in theWesf-Russians had begun to manufacture cannon along with bells; arid, by the sixteenth century, they had produced the largest of each item to be found^njwhexeJnJhe^wpild.So important were these twjnjoeta] jpro^cts_to^uscoyy that Jhe largest example of each was giventhejMs.'T^tZL^.-b^-'^M^E0lokol,'',y/si^ixig nearly half a million^punds^the cannan›_lTsar Pushka,' with abarrel nearly a yard wide.
They represent the first example of 'overtaking and surpassing' a superiorTedhnology. ButTfTey illustrate' as weii the artificiality of the accom-plishrnent. For the bell was too large to hang, the cannon too broad to fire. Technological accomplishments in both fields were, moreover, in good measure the work of foreigners from the time in the early fourteenth century whenXcertim~'Boris the Roman' first came to cast bells for Moscow and Novgorod.^0
If the bell predated the cannon as an object of technological interest, die cannon soon replaced it as the main object of state concern. Many bells in jffovincial skies and monasteries~were^Systematically melted down to provide cannon for the swellingRussian armies of'tEelate seventeenth and' the eighteenth century; but irmbrnHrable'b^rrelmamed in Moscow, the skyline of which was dominated by the soaring 270-foot Bell Tower of Ivan the Great, which Boris Godunov had erected on a hill inside the Kremlin at the Very beginning of this period. This tower was intended (like another massive bell tower built by Patriarch Nikon just outside Moscow in the latter part ofjhe century) to be the/crowning glory of a IN^wJerusalem' on Russtansoil: q. center of civilization built in partial imitation of the ?? ^erusalernTand with enough embellishment to suggest the New. The tower in the Kremlin provided the shelter from which the fundamentalist Old Believers lateTTm^a^sToneTat official church plo^slioTrs^These defenders of the oTdlardeTfesisted the cannon fire of government troopsjfor_eight~ years in their northern monastic redoubt at Solovetsk. After this last, storied bastion fell, they spread out to 'the provinces to watch for the approach of the Tsar's 'legions of Antichrist' from the bell towers of wooden churches, whence they sounded the signal to set fire to the church and the true believers within.82
The later Romanov tsars revealed both uneasy consciences and bad
taste by filling the ancient monasteries with votive baroc[ue_bell towers. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the older bell towers had been largely displaced, restrictions placed onThe excessive ringing of bells, and theh^special positionTn worship services challenged_by_the intrusion of ans and other instruments into Russian liturgical music. Yet the echo of bells lingered on. They ring again majestically at the end of the coronation scene in Musorgsky's Boris Godunov; and the theological hint of redemption offered by their 'ringing through' (perezvon) on the eve of festive days is recaptured by the little barking dog of that name that leads Alyosha's youthful comrades to reconciliation at the end of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov.
In the world of politics, too, the bell called up memories. Bells had been used in some ot the proud, Westward-looking cities of medieval Russia to summonthe popular assembly (veche). Ihe final silencing of the asselribTy'' bell of Novgorod ? 1478 ended the tradition of relative freedom from
imperial authority and partial popuTaT7u1e~wKIcTi~until then Novgorod had shared with many commercial cities of the West. The ideal of non-despotic, representative government impelled the early-hineteenth-century reformer to
take myself in imagination back to Novgorod. I hear the ringing bell of the popular assembly … I throw the chains off my feet, and to the 'Who goes there?' of the guard, I proudly reply: 'a free citizen of Nov-
s°rod!'9'4
and the romantic poet to
sound forth like the bell in the assembly tower in the days of the people's celebrations and misfortunes.94
When, a few years later, lyricism turned to anguish^_Gogol gave_a new, more mysterious quality to the image in one of the most famous passages in all Russian literature. Likening Russia to a speeding troika (carriage with three horses) near_fj}ejend of Dead Souls, he'asks its destination. But 'there was no answer save the^eUpouring forth rnarvellous sound.'
A prophetic answer came a few years later in the prefatory poem to the first issue of Russia's first illegal revolutionary journal-appropriately called Kolokol (The Bell). The long-silent social conscience of Russia will henceforth-promised the editor, Alexander Herzen-sound out like a bell
swinging back and forth with a tone which shall not cease to reverberate until … a joyful, orderly, and quietly heroic bell begins to ring in every man.1*5
but Herzen's summoning bell was soon drowned out by the shrill sounds of the Nabat: the special alarm bell traditionally used in times of fire or attack and the name of the first Russian periodical urging the formation of a Jacobin recolutionary elite.96 Tkachev, the editor of Nabat, was vindicated by the eventual victory of Lenin's professional revolutionaries. BujLunder {Bolshevismj_a.il} bells fell silent-their function to some extenttak^_up_by__ the hypnotic sounding of machine^1_whicluamiQuji«d_-^e_coming of an earthly rather than a heavenly paradise.
The enduring Russian fascination with cannon was evidenced in Ivan IV's storied stonrmT^~qf^Kazajg^ui'i552'; the''shooting ????????'?????? by a Moscow mob in 1606 of the remains of the False Dmitry, the only foreigner ever to reign in the Kremlin; the determination of Chaikovsky to score 'real cannon fire into his 'oVSrfure ???????????????? the defeat of NapgleojijirTffia; and in the iaterlsare' use~of a hundred cannon to announce their annointment during a coronation.97 Stalin was neurotically preoccupied with massed artilTeTyTormafiohs throughout the Second World War; and his military pronouncements conferred only on the artillery the adjective grozny ('terrible' or 'dread') traditionally applied to Ivan IV,,?JL^ ~5ub sequent Soviet success with rockets can be seerTaTan extension of this long-time interest. Tshere seems a kind of historic justice to the~Interde-p'endence in the late 1950's between the dazzling effects of cosmic cannoneering and the renewed promises of a classless millennium.
The Communist world that had come into being by then corresponded less to the prophecies of Karl Marx than to those of an almost unknown Russian contemporary, Nicholas Il'in.99 While the former spent his life as an uprootedJnteDectual in Berlin, Paris, and London, the latter spSurhis~as''a' patriotic artillery officer lffRussian central AsiaCWTiel:elisTn7former iookecT to the rational emergence of a new, basically Western European proletariat under German leadership, the latter looked to the messianic arrival of a new Eurasian religiou^__ciyjhrationunder Russian tutelage. At the very time Marx was writing his Communist Manifesto for German revolutionaries refuged in France and Belgium, Il'in was proclaiming his Tidings of Zion to Russian sectarians in Siberia. U'in's strange teachings reflect the childlike love of cannon, the primitive ethical dualism, and
